The book that started it all . . .

. . . taken by Charles Lesley Ames as reading material on a trip to England in 1907, W. H. Fitchett's The Tale of the Great Mutiny so impressed its reader that he spent the rest of his life building a library on the British-Indian interaction.

In 1961, after more than 50 years of dedicated collecting, Ames gave his library to the University of Minnesota. The gift of over 25,000 titles, including manuscripts, photographs, maps, prints and drawings, immediately established the University as having one of the pre-eminent libraries for the study of South Asia in the western world.